"Our Media Not Theirs" 
                            Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols 

The liberals, or whatever they are calling themselves today (in addition to Democrats), are shaping up for a new assault on America. They've listened to the gripes of the public and hope to co-opt those complaints for their own purposes. Their focus will be the commercial media, especially  television. To the public, TV shows are often silly, or too violent, or they set a bad moral example for our youngsters;  the endless commercials are annoying, and news reporting is often biased and incomplete. Those are the complaints. 

To understand why the liberals are interested in these complaints, consider how they have in the past taken our concerns and irritations and created from them anti-American movements. For many decades citizens were active in improving and conserving the quality of our environment. Singly and in groups they began taking steps to preserve our waterways, forests and air quality.  During the seventies and eighties radical Leftist front organizations launched 
the environmental movement, with lobbyists in Congress petitioning for greater and greater government control over the uses of private and public land, assuming authority as 'the experts,' acquiring massive government grants to fund their activism,  and eventually almost replacing citizen activism. 

Another example was civil rights. Few Americans were comfortable with institutionalized discrimination against the nation's black citizens.  Martin Luther King Jr,. along with many other citizens black and white, brought the issue to a head, and pressured our politicians to end the apartheid laws.  The Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress and the nation moved giant steps toward ending racism in America.  But the radical Left within the Democratic 
Party seized the opportunity to alter the course of this development by playing on another of our concerns: after generations of being held back, would blacks be able to integrate fully and catch up in education and employment?  Before we had opportunity to even consider the tremendous progress blacks had already made despite discrimination, in areas such as their higher rates of employment than whites, higher rates of marriage, their substantial rates of property and business ownership, the Democrats convinced blacks to accept not the end of apartheid but a reformed apartheid in the shape of State-subsidized dependency -- welfare, public housing, and university  and job preferences. 

In these cases and others the public yielded to the Left's co-option of cultural progress.  Changes brought about through citizen involvement usually moves forward in faltering steps, with a lot of questioning about goals, consequences and legalities.  On the other hand, the Left never falters;  its untested solutions are presented and promoted aggressively and confidently, organizations are formed swiftly to help shape government regulations and to gain access to government funding. Citizens hesitantly step aside, allowing these juggernauts to forge ahead.  Usually we're only too thankful to let someone else do the work. 

A funny thing has happened over the past fifty years, though. The bright hopes for full integration and participation of our black citizens has become instead a massive movement of divisivenessness, engendering suspicion, anger, and resentment on the part of both races.  Environmentalism has become a tool for social engineering rather than a genuine commitment 
to the preservation of our environment for our use and enjoyment. The Left may not again find us so gullibly acquiescing to their radical solutions. 

In their book Our Media Not Theirs,  McChesney and Nichols propose to solve our dissatisfactions with the media,  television and newspapers, too,  by placing them under the ownership and management of the government, funded entirely by taxes.  They attempt to frame this government take-over of the media as essential to the survival of our democracy, but the attempts are weak and unconvincing. 

Though they insist that every citizen should have a voice in what is offered on TV (and newspapers and magazines), they present no method by which this could be accomplished other than to suggest that most programming would focus on narrow local issues and interests.  Decisions about the presentation and content of national and international news presumably would be made by government bureaucrats. Expensive entertainment programs would avoid violent cop shows, insipid sit-coms and soap operas, or crude reality shows. 
They would instead be uplifting and educational. 

Under the authors' plan, "media users" (currently called "consumers") would have access to programs that reflect "the best judgement of media workers, not the surreptitious bribe of a commercial interest."  Media workers, whoever they might be, would give us their best shot at providing programs that are good for us, rather than leaving us to the tender mercies of the 
advertisers who will give us precisely the programming we want if only we'll buy their products. In a contest between government 'media workers' educating us, and commercial media anxious to learn what most appeals to us and trying to provide it,  most of us would choose to endure the commercials. Logically, commercial media seems more "ours" than publicly owned media. 

There's a thread of resentment hinted at throughout the book, resentment that the authors' opinions and desires are being ignored, and they consider it their best bet to be heard if the government has control and forces the rest of us to listen, to not be distracted by our own, to them, petty interests.  Consider who wrote forewords to the book: Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader.  Outside of academia and those who believe in massive government control of everything, who listens to them? 

Most astonishing in the book are the exhortations that Americans have a lot to learn about improving our media from other countries -- such as East Timor, New Zealand, Venezuela -- countries whose movement toward government funding and control of the media is making good progress. 

The book is a not very coherent diatribe against all private property ownership -- including copyright and patents -- which is in fact the very basis of American liberties and prosperity.  The authors suggest that in our efforts to reform the media we should connect with other organizations and movements such as the unions, minorities, the feminists, and other special 
interest groups.  They pooh-pooh the importance of the internet and the rising star of Fox News. They also insult America's President Bush as the "moronic child of privilege."  The authors seem to have little use for conservatives, or anyone to the right of Robert Fisk.  The book will appeal most to those who enjoy blaming big business and global free markets for their personal problems as well as the world's ills. The authors are confident of success in 
ridding the media of commercialism, citing the opening doors in Congress from such representatives as Ernest Hollings, Jesse Jackson Jr. and John Conyers, very liberal Democrats all.. 

McChesney and Nichols want the media to become the new "issue" for us, as the environment and civil rights have been before, and then to leave it to them to guide the way. But their record has not been a happy one for us; powerful Leftist organizations coupled with government ownership and regulation have increased the nation's ills, not reduced them.  Much better that we muddle along, getting information and making our individual voices heard over the internet, in public meetings, making changes through our vote and through our very powerful 'wallet vote.'  We've learned our lesson about the Left's 'solutions'; we'll  willingly shoulder the burden of shaping the media to our own liking. 

Peggy Whitcomb 

© 2003 Oregon Magazine